Category: Other

The Walking Dead – A Beginners Woes

Many great shows have come, and yet most have known when to end. It’s hard to understand how a show like The Walking Dead could still be going, and with plans to continue in spin-offs. I’ve always been under the assumption that a zombie show would see survivors move from place to place looking for security until that security is inevitably breached. I mean how else could it go? Now that the mainline series is coming to an end I thought I would finally see what all the fuss was about. Three seasons in and I don’t understand how this show was a movement. It’s absolutely fine. Season one at least gave the characters an anchor to questions relating to a cure, or hope. With the CDC literally blown up in the finale of season 1 it’s hard to understand where the hope for the characters is in this world.

As I continue watching I’m waiting to be pulled in to a larger arc for the characters. Give me a reason to see them fighting this futile future. If it was me I would have ended my life. And I have to say that the most poignant moment thus far was them choosing to live or die at the CDC when it was to be blown up. If there is a reason for each character to be living I want to see what they are fighting for… because as far as we see it, this is the end of the world.

The show itself lost show creator Frank Darabont midway into season 2 over budget restraints. Understandable as the show did set up something that had a lot of potential at the end of season 1 to staying contained to a farmhouse setting for the entirety of season 2. Popularity grew by the end of season 2 to accommodate a much bigger budget in season 3. It seems as though if Frank Darabont had been given the full control he would have continued to steer the show in the stronger direction he cemented in season 1.

I have to say this is one of the ugliest looking shows on tv. I wish we saw more colour than the bleak saturation that is a constant of the show. The editing of the show itself is odd as they will jump cut from what could have been a more interesting scene than the one that followed. It feels like a budget issue and at times it takes away from the pacing of the show and feels jarring. In the future I may give Fear of the Walking Dead a look and see if it has the same shortcomings.

Overall, unless something changes I’m not sure how long I will continue to watch it for. Maybe the drama will strike me or I will find some characters endearing enough to see their journey play out.

Robert Ring

10 Movies to Know Me

These are a list of movies that evoke a type of ecstasy from me. I’m so passionate about these films that they help to define my love of cinema.

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Lawrence of Arabia

This is perhaps the most stunning movie ever made. I have no idea how such a movie was made without the use of CGI. It is without a doubt flawless filmmaking.

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The Assassination of Jessie James by the Coward Robert Ford

I never heard a peep about this movie until watching it on a whim nearly ten years after its release. More people need to see this film. It’s like watching a haunting poem with one of the best film scores ever.

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Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

For many years this was my favourite film. Even after tens of viewings the movie retains the spark of director and writer, Shane Black’s darkly comedic voice.

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La La Land

Musicals are so hard to make good. We only see a handful every year if we’re lucky and maybe a great one every few. La La Land is a great one that combines my love of Hollywood with a beautifully devastating love story. It’s just as somber as it is bright.

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Parasite

Every year I become overly attached to one film that I want everyone to see and last year it was Parasite. Parasite may have been the best film of the decade. I am so very glad that it will be seen by more and more people after winning Best Picture this year. Mum’s the word on this one, just see it.

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About Time

This is no ordinary romantic comedy, and it’s deeper than any other. By the end of the movie your chest will tighten as your tears seep. There’s a scene that you will relate to if you’ve had a close bond with a parent. For me it’s my grandfather and it makes it all the more hard to watch.

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Paddington 2

There may be no better family film than this. If this was released this year it would be nominated for Best Picture and perhaps even win because it’s the uplifting film the world needs right now.

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The Wizard of Oz

Take me to the land of Oz anytime. If I was to enter any fantasy world, this is the one. There is nothing to dislike in this beloved classic. It’s always a source of inspiration for me.

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Beauty and the Beast (1991)

As I watch and rank the Disney Animated films, I’m yet to see anything come close to the masterpiece that is Beauty and the Beast.

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Shaun of the Dead

It may not be a scary movie, but it is my favourite horror movie. All the horror trademarks are here and they’re hilarious. I can watch this on repeat, and I do.

What movies define you?

Robert Ring

Social Justice: The Musical

As a massive fan of PlayStation, I’ve been following IGN alum Colin Moriarty as he went to Kinda Funny, and then created his own business with Colin’s Last Stand. Colin is a die-hard PlayStation fan and has taken his knowledge of the console to podcast the successful Sacred Symbols. On Sacred Symbols, Colin brought in YouTuber Chris Ray Gun to co-host the show, but who is Chris Ray Gun? Well, I didn’t know either, but then I checked out his YouTube channel.

Chris Ray Gun is a musician, a comedian, and he pokes fun at divisive political issues on YouTube. I’ve since watched a lot of his videos and they’re good. I’m not educated enough in politics to know where I fit in, but no matter the group, they seem to be more for antagonizing then helping. The righteousness goes so far that they’ve become the thing they’re fighting for. Chris does a good job at poking fun at the hypocrisy, especially in a series of music videos he’s made called Social Justice: The Musical.

Check out these three videos from Social Justice: The Musical

I’ve watched all these videos on repeat this past week. They resonate with how I’ve been feeling towards social media and journalism. It’s toxic, so I thank Chris Ray Gun for showing us that we can have a bit of a laugh at their expense.

If you like what you see in these videos check out Chris Ray Gun’s YouTube HERE.

And if you want to see a hilarious video of him drinking bleach, click HERE.

Robert Ring

The Doctor Who Plunge

For the longest time, I considered Doctor Who to be the epitome of geekdom. It was this show that carried on for generations. It’s so old my grandfather was tuning in as a young man, and under the same cannon, it continues to this day. My grandfather is the reason I began watching it. After he passed away a couple of months ago, I’ve been thinking about him regularly. He had a quiet and quaint presence all his life, and spiritually he must be the same in the next life because I haven’t felt his presence. The days grow longer when I think about the end of his journey, so I strive to find a way to make these moments bittersweet instead.

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This past week I’ve started watching Doctor Who, and I’m enjoying it. Before I saw only a campiness, similar to an Ed Wood picture, whereas now I see what I believe my grandfather saw, which were the possibilities. The Doctor can travel anywhere in time with his Tardis, and this makes for some incredibly creative journeys. When the Doctor travels to the past, we get a creative albeit Twilight Zone spin on a historical time. However, when the Doctor travels to the future, we’re given thought-provoking instances that humanity may find itself in if given the time. It’s the episodes in the future that I find myself afterward wishing I could get lost in a conversation with my grandfather in. I could have known him for a hundred years and never quite work out how his mind interprets philosophy, time and space. This is the trait I think he shares with the Doctor. If my grandfather had been educated at a university level, he might have become a great engineer or a mad scientist. I’ll never know.

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I do know I’m going to continue watching Doctor Who, and share in something my grandfather adored, only if to feel closer to him for a moment. I’ve almost finished the first season of the 2005 series, and a further fifty odd years worth of content should I feel inclined. I’m sure I’ll make additional Doctor Who posts in the future regarding the series overall.

Robert Ring

9/11 Heroes Among Us

Sitting in a strawberry juice bar atop the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia, I saw what appeared to be an action flick on the small television set across the room. Unlike any action film I’ve experienced with an audience, this one was not garnering its patrons with a sense of awe and entertainment. Things were very quickly feeling real at that moment, and when the second plane hit, this little place had become eerily quiet. I don’t even think glances were passed from one to another. Just quiet… I imagined the entire world felt the same.

A real sense of safety was taken from the entire world on 9/11. It may have been a day true evil was witnessed, but the human spirit was not broken. Everyone was helping each other get through the crisis. Heroes were no longer something given to the likes of fiction, they were people like you and I. Below is an amazing little documentary about some of those unsung heroes. There was so much happening during 9/11 that I don’t think many people even knew of the great feats these men and women came together to do to evacuate Lower Manhattan.

The boatlift of 9/11 was the largest sea evacuation in history with nearly 500,000 people evacuated from Lower Manhattan in less than 9 hours.

This is one of those great heroic stories that reminds us that even when the world is crumbling around us courage and kindness still shine through the dark times.

Robert Ring

The King of the Sweaties

I remember years ago stumbling across AMC Movie Talk on YouTube. It blew my mind quite frankly. A show that talked exclusively about movies by movie fans. These were not just people doing a job; they were more like friends discussing and dissecting movies. AMC Movie Talk made me not feel so alone in my passions for film anymore. In the early days before they moved to Collider, you had John Campea, Dennis Tzeng, Amirose Eisenbach, and of course Jon Schnepp. I enjoy each personality for different reasons, but Schnepp was something else.

Jon Schnepp before movie talk was known for directing shows like Metalocalypse, The Venture Bros, and music videos. Outside of directing, he contributed to plenty of other things that he would sprinkle his flavour on. By the time he came to movie talk his resume could have probably led to further studio projects, but instead, he did what he wanted to do and the way he wanted to do it. So he joined movie talk where he could share his passion for comics, movies and the like. Before long there were pockets of Schnepp fans all over the world. Schnepp never appeared to be chasing fame, he just talked about his passions no matter how obscure or nerdy they may have seemed, and we loved him for it. Look at how obscure the documentary he made was in The Death of Superman Lives: What Happened? It was a film he kickstarted essentially to answer the questions he always had about this bizarre Tim Burton Superman film that was never made. Nobody else would have ever made that documentary, but Schnepp did, and it’s great that we have that. Schnepp’s knowledge was endless in all things nerdy and geeky, allowing him to often tip his hat to an obscure reference or a sizable lecture on the fly. He created his with Sweaties as a term for people letting their geek flag fly without any fear. Schnepp was larger than life, larger than the average human being, a sasquatch if you will.

The days leading up to my grandad’s death I saw that Jon Schnepp had been hospitalized. Knowing my grandad was in his final days I dared not think of Schnepp meeting this fate too. Schnepp was also a guy that you couldn’t imagine being brought down, but seeing the photos of him being hospitalized hurt, they showed the great Schnepp powerless for the first time. Schnepp’s fiancé, Holly Payne revealed that on July 19th Jon Schnepp passed away after complications caused by a stroke. This was the same day as my grandad. I didn’t know what to do with the news. It hung over my thoughts second to my grandad. I never had the pleasure of meeting Schnepp. In all the years I had been watching, he had served me hundreds of hours of entertainment making him feel like apart of my life in some way. In saying that Twitter has also been full of people grieving for Jon as if they knew him because his presence was that powerful. Hell, he affected celebrities too. Kevin Smith had a moment of silence for Schnepp at comic con in Hall H. I saw Patton Oswalt and Aaron Paul tweeting about his loss. Even Henry Cavil, the current iteration of Superman, made a beautiful gesture on Instagram revealing himself to also be a fan of Schnepp. I was watching videos of people remembering him last night, and my girlfriend who watched Schneep passively through me was with tears telling me she always hoped to meet him. I echo that sentiment and wish maybe I had sent him a positive message on Twitter explaining to him how great he was. May we all live to be a little more positive and unabashedly let our inner geekdom out just like this man.

Rest In Peace Jon.

From one of your many many fans,
Robert

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The Spaceman

My grandad passed away Thursday morning.

In the early hours, my family gathered before the bed that my grandad had been occupying for some weeks. His body was frozen in time, mouth gaping on his last breath. Nobody was home.

Later, we went to his house. Internally, I had always blamed grandad for living the simplest of lives. I thought he didn’t quite appreciate what else was outside his daily routine, and the house he rarely left. He was an introvert. He was most comfortable in the time after everyone else was asleep, staying up till three in the morning every night. We went through his workshop as a means of nostalgia but began to see another layer of the man that I had been unaware of. His brain always worked differently, and I started to see how exceptional it was by the organized chaos around. He was mechanically minded creating absurd items with next to nothing in the way of use, just to see if he could. I thought his mind was dulled to the wonders of life, but he was instead brilliant in his way. I will never fully understand the complexity of my grandad. Underneath it all, he was the most unique, strong, honest, and upstanding man I had ever met. I will carry him in my heart always.

Love Robert

The image of his body as it was made me ponder his last moment. Is death beautiful? And if not, how could it be? So, I wrote a little short conversation he might have had in that last moment with death. I call this The Spaceman.

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I suspect he is exploring and tinkering away like a spaceman in the next place.

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Welcome to KissTheMovies!

Here at KissTheMovies we will talk about the latest from film news, movie reviews, film lists and a little bit on the television side as well. This website is the start of what I hope to be a wondrous venture for myself and hopefully it translates to others as well.
I look forward to growing and communicating with many of you.
Robert Ring